Radical Body Acceptance: An Interview with Kate Marolt

When Kate Marolt decided she was done hating her body, she didn't start her journey into radical body acceptance by wanting to love herself. She started with the thought:

"I want to feel like I deserve to be at home in my body."

It was a desire to simply feel like this body could be a comfortable place to live, instead of a source of everything that was wrong in her life.Little did she know that this desire would lead her to become a fearless advocate for women's bodies everywhere. Now, she works with women to help them feel more at home in their bodies and selves so they can find freedom in their lives.Kate and I have known each other for years, and we had no idea that we struggled with the same thoughts and self-worth issues. Without knowing, we both embarked on similar journeys to heal our relationships with our bodies and our worth at almost the same time. Since then, we've reconnected in deeper, more profound way and are collaborating on something I can't wait to tell you about.Kate is my soul-sister and fellow warrior in the movement to release body shame and reclaim power in our bodies no matter what they look like. I've invited her here to talk about her story because I hope that you'll resonate with any of her many gems of wisdom.You don't have to hate yourself anymore. You don't need to look any way to feel at home in your body. Most of the problems in our lives are not our bodies' fault, yet we convince ourselves that they are because it helps us to have something to blame.Kate will tell you all about how she discovered this for herself. In the interview below, Kate shares:

• her journey from perfectionism to balance
• how to start shifting your beliefs about your body and its connection to your worth
• why you can never think your way into healing your body image
• the process she uses to change her outlook on "negative" experiences
• what she does to expand communication within her body to cultivate both energy and peace

I hope you enjoy watching, reading or listening as much as I enjoyed our chat.

Click here to download the audio interview!

Full Transcript

Amy: Welcome, Strongies! I've got one of my very good friends, Kate Marolt here on the show with us today. We're just going to talk about real stuff today. Kate, welcome.

Kate: Thank you, hi.

Amy: I'm so glad we're finally doing this after years of knowing each other.

Kate: Me too.

Amy: I know it's so awesome. Okay, so would you want to tell people a little bit about yourself and where you're coming from?

Kate: Sure. I'm Kate, I am in the online space I work with a lot of women and sometimes men on really feeling at home in their bodies and really creating a sense of peace and security within themselves in the middle of all this crazy stuff that gets thrown at us in the world. Around diets, around body image, around how we're suppose to act and be in the world and when some part of us doesn't line up with that it can feel really disconcerting and really lonely. Really looking at how we can bring all of that into alignment so that you or whoever it is that is in this work at the moment can really feel free to express yourself and to be yourself and to enjoy your life in a way that you want to enjoy your life. That's where I am at now and it's super fun. It's definitely now where I always was. I don't know if you want me to go into my story right now.

Amy: I would love to, I would love to hear all about your background and where you came form because it's an amazing story that you have.

Kate: Thank you. Yeah, I would say probably about ten years, fifteen years ago was when I went on my first diet and I was like, early teens. I was like "Okay, something's got to change because I'm not happy and all the magazines I'm reading are telling me it's because I'm no thin enough or I'm not fit enough, or I'm not eating right", so that was kind of my, where I ended up going was like "Oh, well, I'm really smart. I'm doing great, I love school. I'm doing speech team, I'm in the plays, I'm in art class and doing all these things", I was like "Everything else in my life is great, but if I'm not happy it must be because of my body isn't good enough". That was the message that I got really early on and that was a message that I held onto for a really, really long time. I never told anybody, not even my parents, that I was dieting or cutting calories and working out. By the time I was seventeen I was weighing myself everyday and was really kind of basing my worth on the number I saw on the scale, or how many calories the elliptical machine had said that I had burned that day.

Amy: We all know that's the truth, it never lies, it's completely real. Psst! It’s not, Strongies, it's the worse thing.

Kate: Yeah, completely real, it doesn't even ask me anything about my body.

That's what I thought I needed to do. Going into college, I kind of kept that up, but I just amplified all of it because I was on my own for the first time. Not only did I amplify it doing all of the achieving things because that was one way to prove to the world that I was worthy, "Well, if I can get two degrees and study abroad and have three jobs and still get all A's and be the president of the ultimate Frisbee team and volunteer in my spare time, everyone will see that I'm worthy", that was my desire in the world. I wasn't aware of it so much at the time, but I kept knowing that I just had to do more and figure it out, but underneath all that was this  really crazy roller coaster of emotions.I would go out and binge drink and then i would come home and weigh myself or I would like wake up the next morning and be like "Okay, now I'm on a diet, this is happening". I would only eat certain things, but then I would go out and drink again and have a burrito at four am. All this, it was this crazy cycle of "Okay, I'm going to have self control.", "Oh my god I fucked it up". It was back and forth constantly.

By the time I left, I left the city that I was living in about a couple months after university was over, I was probably weighing myself fifteen, sixteen times a day and running home between classes, getting up in the middle of hanging out with friends to go use the scale in the bathroom. It was such a weird disconnect between this feeling of like "I am strong and capable and I can accomplish anything in the world.", but also this need to control this thing about me that I was certain just wasn't good enough and it was never going to be good enough. I would get to the goal and it would have to be the next goal. I'm not going to like, that was like still years ago at this time though when I moved and my scale broke in the move. When I got to Denver, I moved to Denver, my scale broke. It was the first thing I did, I found it, I pulled it out and I was like "Oh, this might be a sign".

Amy: Divine intervention there.

Kate: I was literally saying "If I stay in the city that I live in I'm going to die, like I need that". Just because of the way that I was living, I was like "This isn't ... I'm going to die, I can't stay here.". It was interesting because then, you know, over the years I became a yoga instructor. I accidentally became a fitness instructor, I wanted to teach more yoga classes and the place that I was teaching at was like "We don't have yoga available, but if you want to teach spin or barre or kettle bells or all these things. You could take the training and do that." I was like "Okay, sure." Never thought I would be a fitness worker in my entire life. I loved that I did that for about three years.

It was amazing, but what I found was that I actually, like at first I was like "This is great, this is positive, I'm taking care of my body, everything feels awesome!" I was like getting into the spiritual side of yoga too, I was like "This is really cool", but what I was also doing was I had a heart rate monitor and was counting calories with every class I was taking. The more I learned about nutrition the more I could be super particular about weighing my food and what I was eating and nobody else was eating these specific foods s it was totally normal if I didn't either. I would go on sugar detox's and cleanses, then I would do the whole thirty and I would do all these things, none of which in themselves bad or wrong at all, but when I was using those as a way to fix myself, it didn't work. I would do it and feel really accomplished and as soon as I got done I would go binge eat on something. Then I was like "Nobody could know because I'm the yoga teacher and I'm suppose to have my shit together".

Amy: It's that perfectionism and I think that ... Oh my gosh, I just love your story so much because we both had these similar journeys and I think we were going parallel for a while and just not talking to each other about them. Which is so funny because now we are both doing this work of like our fucking worth is not based on what we look like, it's not based on all of these things that we do and how much we accomplish it just is there. That's why I think that we just recently come back together like full swing and it's just so exciting to me because while I do this work, I don't know if you realize this too, we just start kind of like finding these people who are also like "You're okay, acceptance is a good thing even if your not perfect yet.” Perfection is something we talk about a lot on Strong Inside Out, do you want to talk to us a little bit about how you kind of started to heal your perfectionism?

Kate: Yeah, it was definitely incremental and practice and I would go in and out of it, but after those like three years of teaching classes I hit a similar kind of breaking point. It wasn't that I felt like I was going to die, I just realized that I'm still burning myself out every couple of months, I am still overdoing and trying to please everybody. I love the work that I'm doing, I can't do it in this way anymore, was I kind of my realization. What was scary about it was, I really wanted to work with people on the emotional side of things and see how our mental and creative power is so tied in to how we feel about our bodies, but I wasn't there yet, so it scared me. I didn't see anybody else doing it and so finally I just said "I have to take a step back".

Part of my starting to heal that perfectionism was I just stopped doing things for a while. I had to like undo so much tension in my body, so many beliefs that I had about who I was and how I operated in the world. I definitely did it with, I had support, I had coaches, I had people around me. I had left the country a few times to just see how different people lived and just experience the world. It was big, a big piece of that was stepping away from everything that I thought I knew to be true. Literally sold all my stuff left my house, left the city that I called home for a while, and I'm not saying that needs to happen for everybody at all. I tend to be extreme sometimes when I'm deciding I'm changing things. It really was like an undoing.

Amy: I think you really brought up a really good point. Really, really, really. You said that you were extreme about basically your recovery and that's the same thing that happened to me. Right in the beginning I was like “Distraction-free eating, I'm doing it for six weeks, no exceptions.” It's so funny how we like try to heal this extreme thinking that we have with another extreme action and luckily that led us to a more balanced result. How would you recommend that somebody go about this if they don't want to go into the extreme, if they really want to do a balanced version of this?

Kate: Yeah, I think that's great and I would not recommend being extreme about it.

Amy: Me nether.

Kate: The biggest things that I've found and I say this about basically everything, is like we have to start with where we are. To begin by taking a really clear inventory of like, what is in your life right now? Where is your time going, where is your energy going? How do you feel in certain situations and it's with certain people? Notice like how do you feel in your house, how do you feel at your work? Not trying to change anything yet, but just really being aware of what is here. Who is that person that like no matter what they ask you you're like "Oh, yeah totally I'll do it,” and then later you're like "Why did I say that?" I feel like we all have at some degree one of those, one or two or five of those people in our life.

Amy: One, or two, or five.

Kate: Just starting to be aware of where time and energy goes because that's going to point you to your perfectionist tendencies. It's like "oh, I'm constantly late, but I'm constantly late because I'm trying to organize my house or do this thing and I have to complete that last email before I leave the house", it's like, what's underneath that, why do I feel that urge and starting to look at those places.

Amy: Yeah, that's a really good tip, just starting with the awareness of it. That's really wonderful. Okay, so you talked a little bit about body positivity, well this all connects into body positivity, but coming from a space where all we've known ... Both of us kind of went through this and I think a lot of Strongies go through it to because they're starting with diet and exercise and that feels great until it gets obsessive, until it gets extreme, until it starts ruling our minds and it becomes more fear based instead of what makes my body feel good, what feels healthy to me. More like I need to be this size I need to be this weight in order to, you know, be anything.

Kate: Yeah.

Amy: How would you recommend somebody who's in that space, who is feeling like "I want to take these steps, I want to love myself more,” or even "I'm just done with hating myself, I just don't want to hate myself anymore, even if it's not to the point of I want to love myself. I just don't want to hate myself anymore, but I feel like there are all of these expectations that society places on me. How do I step into that fear and start doing something about hating myself?"

Kate: Yeah, that's such a great question and I'm going to both give a little context and say baby steps. This is not a time for extreme action at all. There's a really interesting place of that where, like I shared with me, where like I knew I was pretty awesome, I knew I was pretty great and for whatever reason I just could not reconcile that with my body until I was ready. Until I actually was like "You know what, this makes me really nervous and I don't even know if this is possible, but I want to feel like I deserve to be at home in my body and I don't know how to feel that, but I want to feel that.” First thing that I kind of did with somebody else's guidance was I just wrote an open letter to my body.

Amy: I've done that too.

Kate: Yeah, I just said all the things that I felt like I needed to say. It was both anywhere from like "Here's why I thought you betrayed me,” to like "I'm so sorry for treating you this way,” to like "Thank you for doing this,” or like "Why did this happen,” and just writing out everything I've ever though about my body and it was super emotional. At the end of it I didn't feel like anything had changed, but it started the process. Just like:

What happens if I'm not trying to change anything, but I am willing to start communicating?

Amy: I like that, I think that should be a title of your course by the way "Communi-Kate".

Kate: I almost just spit my coffee out.

Amy: I though that was like, trademark. That's such a good point. Lindy West talks about this in her book Shrill, too. About how you just can't force being ready, you just come to a point where you're like "I am just done hating myself,” and it's different for every person and different things will bring us there. I don't think it's something that we can force to happen, it's not something that we can just like push ourselves into, it's just a realization that we're done hating ourselves, not. Hopefully, as more and more of us start talking about this, especially in the wellness space here to, hopefully we'll make it acceptable for people to start having that realization earlier and earlier. I know that's like a mission of mine.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, with that too, I know for a long time I kept having that thought "I should be better than this, I know better than this. I should have this figured out by now,” I think that that is kind of a trade mark saying of smart intelligent people of like "I should know better, so why.” Those of us at least ... For me I was taught that the intellectual, mental realm is a safe place, that's where I can logic and reason and argue and do all these things and figure stuff out there. That was the safe place, I was like "I get it all in my head, why isn't this happening in my life, why can't I figure this out." 

It's not just a head thing. We can say we're right, but we have to start to feel it and be okay with knowing we're not going to have it all figured out before we get going.

Amy: Yeah and I know that for me too, like I know you are a spiritual person as well and for me I was kind of, but I just like, I grew up in an atheist household, so it was so weird and not acceptable in my family. It was something I had to come to on my own. Embracing that everything happens for a reason for me because I'm just kind of open with spirituality, it really helped me to let some of the pressure off of myself so I could start taking those actions too. I wasn't just "Why can't I get this?!” beating myself up for it all the time, but really just opening up to "Maybe I'm just supported in ways that I can't even see, maybe I'm being lead in this direction, maybe it hurts for a reason,” like that kind of stuff really helped me a lot. Can you talk a little bit about how that has helped you as well?

Kate: Totally. On one side I feel super fortunate that when I was a teenager I was given the option, the opportunity to go to some leadership and success seminars, where I was taught basically the law of attraction, and the law of action and these laws of the universe that get sprinkled throughout a lot of spiritual new age stuff these days. I was taught it by old, not old, they were like middle age, when I was fifteen they were old.

Amy: Old then.

Kate: Older men who where super successful business owners, who were just like "Yeah, this is how it works, here's how this works,” so to me, I know this totally speaks for society, since those were the people teaching me, I felt like "Okay, this must be true,” because they were men who wore suits and owned multimillion dollar companies. I was like "If it works for them it's got to be a real thing", and it's funny because now I see people sharing those things, I'm like "Oh, yeah I learned that a long time ago.”

That was really cool in the sense that I had that as a base, but one thing that really shifted things was a couple years ago when I had one of my coaches say "Okay, you don't get to ask what's wrong with me, the world, or this situation anymore, you only get to ask what's right about this,” and I was like "Oh, I don't know how to do that. You want me to do what?" It was interesting because I practiced that, really diligently, even though I was like, there was certain things where like "There can't possibly be anything right about this.” I would just say "What's right about this,” or like "What if there is something, if this is what's happening, why? I wonder what's going to happen because of it." Trying to take that more birds eye view of like here's where I am at in this moment, I'm present to it, but also I have no idea how this is going to effect me or the world over time.

Amy: Yes completely and that is something I just went through. We just taught together at Camp Nerd Fitness – it's one of the things we've done three years running together now and I got pink eye this last week, which was hilarious because it's an adult camp not a kids camp, so it's really hard to get pink eye. I don't even understand how I got it. When I initially got it that spiral happened in the very beginning I was like "Oh my gosh, what did I do wrong, am I unclean?" especially with my OCD and stuff like that I was like "So unclean.” Then I had to forcefully almost stop myself and say "Okay, this is being brought to me for a reason, what is this here to teach me?” and it completely shifted that mindset. That takes practice guys, it's not going to happen right off the bat either.

Kate: No.

Amy: I think asking, what's right about this or what could be right about this is a great stepping stone into shifting that paradigm for yourself, for sure.

Kate: Absolutely.

Amy: Also, I know that you do ... This is kind of out of the blue, sorry I'm just totally switching.

Kate: That's cool.

Amy: I know you talk a lot about meditation, like you are a meditation guru. Your voice is like the most peaceful thing ever. We just taught a class together at camp and you didn't even lead a meditation, but the whole time I was like "Mm", just listening to you speak. I know you do a lot of meditation and you teach a lot of meditation. How has meditation helped you along this kind of journey of accepting yourself too?

Kate: Such a great question and meditation is still the thing I resist the most, which is probably why i teach it so much and like speak to it so much.

Amy: Really?

Kate: As somebody who was constantly go, go, go, got to do the stuff, got to finish that, accomplish that, be at this place at that time, my brain never stops, it's always going right until I fall asleep and right when I wake up. I always have crazy dreams, my brain is always going. When I first started meditation, it was in my very first yoga teacher training, like six years ago. I was so fascinated by it because I was fortunate to have a really great teacher who told me that it wasn't about emptying my thoughts, it wasn't about achieving enlightenment, it was simply about observing and being aware. I was like "Oh, that's interesting, I cannot go from that place", I find now, I still don't meditate everyday, I would love to say that I did, I don't. Now I can kind of, I can feel these like signals of you need to be still. If I'm in a place of kind of feeling anxious or overwhelmed or "I have so much work to do, I need to do this,” and I kind of start spinning, that's my signal of stillness, become stillness.

That's what I try to teach and share with people [about meditation]: how to recognize those signals. How to just sit and be in your body, without trying to change the thoughts, without trying to be different in anyway, but just noticing, just being aware.

It has helped me in so many ways, but mostly in that like, what I've discovered, especially though more like somatic meditation, which is body centered meditation, is that when I sit and give my body permission to communicate with itself, communicate with the environment around me, that a lot of information and messages come in. Not necessarily ones I understand in my brain, but more information is available to my body and my cells and they are able to communicate better to each other, which to me starts to looks like, I have more energy, I feel more at peace, I feel less stressed, I can quiet down when my nervous system is all crazy. That's been one of the biggest most amazing things. I also think to it's important that like, you know cool, if you meditate for thirty or forty five minutes or whatever, but you could get the same types of benefits in five minutes if you are really willing to sit and be present from the get-go.

Amy: Yes, because if it was thirty to forty five minutes I would never ever meditate.

Kate: The only times I do that is when I go to meditation retreats or like yoga things. It's great when that happens and for me at least that's not for me right now.

Amy: Yeah, I totally hear you on that, totally. Oh my gosh, you have so much more even to share with us, but I think we'll give Strongies a little bit of a break and I want them to be able to find you. Where can they find you? Where can they follow you?

Kate: My website is KateMarolt.com and I'm super active on Instagram and on Facebook. Instagram is @Kate_Marolt and Facebook is my name, I'm the only one there's two and there both me. It's pretty easy to find me. I would love to connect, I would love if there is questions, please reach out.

Amy: Awesome, awesome and you can get some of Kate's meditations on her site to and believe me they're awesome. Kate thank you so much for coming over here. I am very excited to announce to Strongies something we are doing together very soon, but no hints here, we're going to tell you very soon. Thank you for joining us today. Have a wonderful day, Strongies.

Kate: Byeeeee.

*****

I hope you can see now why I love this girl so much. Her views on body acceptance and balance are empowering and freeing for anyone who's open to just being done hating themselves.I hope with all of myself that you are soon included in that group. You so deserve love especially from yourself.In a couple of weeks, I'll elaborate on Kate's and my collaboration. I'm so freaking excited to tell you about it, but until then, no hints! ;)That's that for now, Strongie! Click the links below to follow Kate!Follow Kate:

• Check out Kate's site!
• Follow Kate on Instagram!
• Become friends with Kate on Facebook!
• Like Kate on Facebook!
• Join Kate's 30-day meditation course here! (She's extending the Camp Nerd Fitness deal to Strongies!)

Stay strong,Amy